From 248am.com

Some fruits and vegetables are not too expensive but it is too expensive for good whole wheat flour to make bread. Here is costs 2.5 KD at The Sultan Centre which is approximately 5.3 UK Pounds at today’s rate. Other more exotic flours like their spelt and rye mix are even more expensive.

The chicken is quite tasty. It tastes better than the chicken from the Sultan Centre but the Sultan Centre chicken is a bit cheaper at 1 KD.

And the staff is very friendly. If you want to see where the place is on a Google Map click here.

These bananas are available in the Sultan Centre and are not too ripe. They must be in season now in India. I’ve had these in south India and they are delicious. You don’t know what a banana should taste like if you haven’t had these. In fact, the regular commercial bananas have been the Cavendish variety least flavourful variety chosen since the 1950′s for their resistance a soil fungus called Panama Disease. There is a podcast with full transcript here at Scientific American about it.

Now there is concern that diseases will seriously affect the current crops particularly in Africa.

Basically he is saying we are wasting billions of dollars on treating overeating related diseases need to eat better and not get so fat. In fact he states that, “One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.”

This applies in the whole world. Probably even more in developing countries and the big corporations fatten up the growing middle classes.

The New York Times

September 10, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Berkeley, Calif.

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.

That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

That’s why it’s easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of eating.

But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that course.

For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it down.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

And after shopping they help you load the groceries. Note the sun in the photo. A regular hot dusty day.

Updated with the video above from Michael Ruhlman Notes from the Food World blog. Link via kottke.org. I’ve written also about overeating recently. And many other posts on food.

I just finished In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It is a bestseller and very interesting. For so many years I was interested in eating well and this has given me a rethink. And reading it after I read The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite which I blogged about earlier.

He talks about how we got where we are and that we need to escape from the western diet which we all know has it troubles.

So he dedicates pages to defining food. giving some rules of thumb including:

• don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize a food
• avoid food products containing ingredients that are
  • unfamiliar
  • unpronounceable
  • more than five in number
  • include high fructose corn syrup
• avoid products that make health claims

And how to do this he adds

• shop the periphery of the supermarket and stay out of th middle
• get out of the supermarket whenever possible (such as farmer’s markets)

Then he gives advice on what to eat

• mostly plants of course, and especially leaves
• you are what you eat eats too. What is the animals you are eating eating.
• eat well grown foods from healthy soils, in other words there is more in soil that plants need than synthetic fertilizers
• eat wild foods if you can
• take supplements, in moderation a multivitamin and mineral pill maybe some fish oil supplement

Basically he advises that we eat traditional cultural foods, tried and tested over generations. What I found interesting is his comments on soy products. We’ve industrialized them rather with textured soy protein etc rather than relying on the traditional soy products such as tofu.

Along these lines he advises us to

• regard traditional foods with skepticism
• don’t look for a magic bullet in the traditional diet

Then more on what too eat

• not too much
• pay more for less, of higher quality
• eat meals
• do all your eating at a table (a desk is not a table)
• don’t’ get your fuel from he same place your car does
• try not to eat alone
• consult your gut. It takes 20 minutes for us to feel full so don’t just eat by visual clues
• that is, eat slowly
• cook and if you can plant a garden

I couldn’t help noticing on the following photograph of the Apollo 11 launch day breakfast of steak and eggs that the steak is not massive like we now consider a steak — particularly in Texas!

OK that is enough plagiarism of his book. Just read it!

The latest on Food Allergies at the NewScientist. What you are allergic to depends on where you live.

Via kottke.org

Wow it’s 2012 and this post continues to be my most popular one, more than my stapedectomy post and even my post about hardware stores in Kuwait! Well no hot dates here unless you want a link to recipes to bake some nice date squares or some bacon wrapped dates!

The kind of dates that this post is about are the ones that grow on date palms. I imagine that this post gets many visitors interested in the other kind of dates. Well if you arrive here for that reason, you are better off to go to other sites for online dating, to meet other singles, find love, relationships or whatever. But if you are hear to find out about the amazing date palm, read on a bit. And I’ll continue to add to this post over time with more information about dates. I am slowly going through the book, The Date Palm: From Traditional Resource to Green Wealth (Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research)

Dates are an amazing food, full of nutrients and of many varieties. The date palm as food has been used by people in the Arabian Gulf for over 7500 years. In 2001 world date production was 5.4 million tons and increasing at about 5% a year. The top five date producing countries in 2001 were Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iraq.

Though if you want to fix a spinal injury, you better go for the blue M&Ms!

Here’s another blog post on dates with further information in its comments including a link to a map showing where the dates market is (look at the x in the middle of the map). I’m going shopping for dates on 8 August and will report on my success. I want to get a selection of the very best quality dates.

The Kuwait Times has this article saying Kuwait dates are available early this year but the best are yet to arrive.


Kuwaiti dates make an early appearance at markets

Published Date: July 28, 2009
By Ben Garcia, Staff writer

KUWAIT: Although traditionally, Kuwaiti dates are made available only on the first week of August, as a reversal of custom they can now be found in plenty this year. However, if you want the finest Kuwaiti dates, you should wait till the first week of August or September experts advised. At this early stage, dates can be purchased at a low price at any date shops in Kuwait. Yesterday, Kuwait Times found them for sale at the market. The shop owner admitted that the best Kuwaiti dates are yet to arrive. Expe
rts noted that dates become edible when allowed to ripen naturally.

Traditionally, Kuwaiti dates are sold only in August, September and October. After these months, the next ones (dates) are imported from Jordan and Iraq. However, Iraqi dates, according to the shop owner, are transported through Jordan. They are then called Jordanian dates.

The 1990 Iraqi aggression has played a big role in barring any trade with Iraq. “No dates from Iraq are allowed to enter Kuwait,” whispered the owner who reminds me of history. “There are lots of edible dates from Iraq but we have a problem of importing them directly,” he said.

The finest dates from Saudi Arabia have begun arriving in Kuwait since early July, but it will be available till December. From January to June, the varieties available in Kuwait are mainly from the Americas, Europe and the rest of date exporting countries like Tunisia and Guatemala. Since it can be imported from other countries, dates are available here the whole year round.

Dates play a significant role in Islam, especially during the month of Ramadan. The Holy Quran has clearly advised believers to use ‘tamer’ (dried dates) while breaking fasts. It is part of the Iftar tradition to dates in a variety of ways. Diwaniyas and meetings all over Kuwait are incomplete without sweetened dates served to their visitors.

There are several kinds of dates available in Kuwait. The most popular types are the Birhi, Ikhlass, Makboosh (pressed), Sukari, Ajwa, Sigie and Khudary. On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates is proud of their Makhtoomi (red) and Birhi types. The UAE boasts of the biggest date farm in the world that covers an area of 1,321 square hectare with more than 62,000 palm trees, a UAE website claims.

The most expensive but also ‘best selling date’ is a type called Iklas. It is imported from Saudi Arabia. The period between August to December is considered the ‘date season,’ where the fruit is more affordable. If you wish to purchase a variety of dates, Souq Ratab (Tamar), located near Gahzali Street in Shuwaikh is just one of the many places in Kuwait that exclusively sell different types of edible dates.